In part 1 of this post, I introduced the story of William Hayden, who was enslaved upon his birth in Stafford County in 1785, and separated from his mother, Alcy Shelton, by their owner around 1790. Hayden freed himself in 1823, and in 1846 published a memoir: Narrative of William Hayden…Written by Himself. Aside from his book’s extraordinarily rare, eyewitness-derived woodcuts depicting slave life the Fredericksburg area, I’m fascinated by its account of the long-term psychological and spiritual influences of a particular landscape: Belle Plain plantation, Hayden’s birthplace in Stafford and his first home.

Sunrise, Potomac Creek at Belle Plain, 2013.

Anyone who makes a close historical study of a battlefield engages with the psychological history of terrain features. I suspect that this aspect of landscapes, and of our historical efforts, is often so obvious that we’re unaware of it. For instance, a pair of modest homesteads at Hazel Grove and Fairview assumed paramount importance during the battle of Chancellorsville. The plans of commanders who suddenly found themselves tasked with the defense or capture of those places and the ground in-between would of course have real consequences for soldiers on May 3, 1863, one of the bloodiest days in the nation’s history.

I suspect, too, that the constant interchange between specific, seemingly undistinguished collections of soil, water, foliage, and buildings on the one hand, and ideas, beliefs, or sentiments on the other—with profound consequences for people’s lives sooner or later—is even less apparent, at least at first, when we consider aspects of history that lack the broad drama of armies contending on a battlefield.

In penning his memoir, which is virtually unknown today, William Hayden located the earliest stirrings of his Christian faith at his mother’s cabin, and with his savoring during childhood of a view of the morning sun and its reflection in the waters of Potomac Creek. The vista from the cabin and its immediate vicinity was bordered by the hills and flatlands of William and Alcy’s home-plantation, Belle Plain on the creek’s south bank, and by those of his father’s likely home-plantation, Crow’s Nest on the opposite bank.

New Sun in Potomac Creek at Belle Plain, minutes later.

William’s faith included what he termed “presentiment,” a confidence that he would serve as one of God’s instruments. The first of the resulting, happy outcomes was William’s timely intervention while still a child at the onset of a fire at the Belle Plain cabin (illustration in pt. 1 of this post). The same faith gave him the perseverance and optimism to eventually escape the enslavement that had begun on that very landscape, then return to the Fredericksburg area as a free man in hopes of rescuing his mother from enslavement as well (she having since relocated to Falmouth). He planned to remove her from Virginia. Ideally, the exodus would also include his brother, sister, her husband, and at least two of the sister’s children, all of who were evidently free people of color. Likely prominent in William’s calculations was a state law, albeit one applied irregularly, that required persons legally freed to leave Virginia within one year or face re-enslavement.

Our story resumes in the dark, early morning hours of a July day in 1828, with William arriving on the stagecoach from Belle Plain at a Fredericksburg hostelry kept by a “Mr. Young”—almost certainly the Farmer’s Hotel, managed by James Young.

The granite-fronted Enterprise Building was built around 1900 on the site of the Farmer’s Hotel in 1828.

William Hayden was born into slavery in 1785, at Belle Plain plantation on Stafford County’s Potomac Creek and near the Potomac River. His owner separated William while still a child from his mother. William returned as a free man decades later in an effort to liberate her and perhaps his sister as well.

William Hayden at the time he published his memoir in the 1840’s.

Hayden stands out not only for attempting this prior to the Civil War, without the new paths to liberation that the war would open for other enslaved people, but also for publicly condemning the system that had devastated his family, in a memoir published in 1846. The Narrative of William Hayden…Written by Himselfalso traced the origins of his faith as a Christian.

Looking east along Potomac Creek and then across the Potomac River, from a point near the site of the main plantation house at Belle Plain—the basic elements (modified by reforestation and bank-erosion) of William Hayden’s beloved vista. Lowest shoreline, appearing blue-gray in far distance, is Maryland on opposite side of the Potomac River. Closer, two-level shoreline at left is Crow’s Nest, in Stafford County, Virginia and on opposite side of Potomac Creek from Belle Plain. (In 1864, as shown on the map linked in my text below, Union wharves were situated along the right bank of the creek: one just upstream, to the left of the camera-position here, the remainder downstream.)

Along with written descriptions, the memoir includes wood engravings, or woodcuts. These are stylized and doubtless reflect the imagination of a non-eyewitness engraver to one degree or another. Yet several of the artworks may represent the only pictorial illustrations of enslaved people’s lives in the Fredericksburg area, prepared at the direction of someone who was once held in bondage in the area and who returned to again witness slavery there firsthand.

Narrative of William Hayden opens two years after the end of the American Revolution, with the author’s birth at Belle Plain to Alcy Shelton, a slave of “George Ware,” and James, a slave of “Mr. Daniel.” Judging from background information on the estate, in historian Jerrilynn Eby’s 1997 county history, They Called Stafford Home, William Hayden’s memory over half a century had modified some spellings slightly: Alcy’s owner was actually George Waugh, who shared occupancy of the 1,500-acre Belle Plain plantation with his brother, Robert Waugh. George and Robert’s father, John Waugh, had died in 1783 in possession of at least 39 enslaved people, Alcy Shelton probably among them.

William Hayden’s own father, James (with whom he evidently never lived and whose minimal mention in the Narrative does not even include a last name), was perhaps the property of Travers Daniel, who owned Crow’s Nest plantation on the opposite side of Potomac Creek from Belle Plain.

Since the Belle Plain plantation house survived until the Civil War, this detail from an 1841 plat reflects the basic landscape of Hayden’s childhood decades earlier. The exact location of his mother’s cabin is unknown; it may have been situated, along with other dependency structures, in the area marked “barn” here. The steamboat landing was not present during Hayden’s childhood, but by the 1820’s it was operational and likely the point where he disembarked when returning to the area as a free man. Copy courtesy of the White Oak Museum.

William’s first recorded memory was of savoring the morning scenery from the door of the cabin he shared with his mother, brother, and sister. The cabin afforded views of both Potomac Creek and the Potomac River, occupying a location on or near the main road from Fredericksburg. The plantation’s frontage on Potomac Creek adjoined the sites of a Colonial-era wharf and public warehouse for tobacco shippers, and would gain national fame during the Civil War.

(For my GoogleEarth overlay map of the Federals’ Belle Plain wharf-sites in 1864 click here and scroll down to fifth illustration; for John Hennessy’s account of Charles Dickens’ visit to Belle Plain in 1842 click here.)

The sun and its reflection in Potomac Creek, with the cabin of Hayden’s mother at left. Although this woodcut from Narrative of William Hayden obviously exaggerates the topography of Crow’s Nest plantation across the creek, Civil War soldiers would comment on the steepness of the area’s heavily eroded ravines.

Thinking back to childhood mornings in that cabin doorway in the 1780’s, William Hayden recalled the origins of his faith, and his being struck by the twin heralds of

The Day God as he peered from the chambers of the east, and cast his reflection from the clear bosom of the Potomac, appear[ing] to my infantile mind like two suns–the one in the heavens, and the other in the body of the waters; and every morning, it was my desire, and indeed, my first employment, to repair to the door and witness the rising of the two suns. …witnessing with joy, the beauties of Heaven, and Heaven’s goodness.

From John Hennessy (with thanks to the Fredericksburg Area Museum for providing us with this copy of the letter):

Click to enlarge

Though only a few words, and though at first blush entirely common, this is a remarkable document. It is from the collections of the Fredericksburg Area Museum and Cultural Center–in fact it is on display in their permanent exhibit. It consists of an exchange between a 24-year-old Stafford County Doctor Augustine S. Mason and Fredericksburg’s dominant slaver trader before the Civil War, George Aler (whom we have written about here). Mason was an 1855 graduate of the University of Virginia Medical School and had been married just six weeks before he wrote this note (he would soon be a surgeon in the Confederate army). In it he wishes to sell a slave named Thomas to Duff Green of Falmouth, but before doing so wants to know what Thomas is worth, and so he goes to the man who would know–Aler.

What makes this document compelling and ironic is this: Thomas himself carries it to Aler, and presumably returns the answer, which declares him to be worth “no more than 500 dollars.” Aler also asserts that there would like be few persons willing to buy him “in his present condition.”

We do not know what afflicted Thomas, and we cannot know if Thomas knew the nature of the message he carried between Mason and Aler (odds are Thomas could not read). We do not know either if the sale was ever consummated (it probably was, because the 1860 slaves census shows Mason owned five slaves, none of them an adult male). But we can grasp the essentials of the moment: a man subjected himself to and carried to his owner a stark assessment of the value of his own self to the white-dominated world in which he lived.

Falmouth Dec. 30th 1858

Dear Sir-

I have agreed to let D Green Scott have the bearer Thomas but what would you value him at today.

Respectfully A.S. Mason

Frdg Dec 30th 1??

Dear Sir-

I think in his condition he is not worth more than 500 dollars.

It is almost impossible to come at the true value in the market as very few persons would by him in his present condition.

Given our many discussions here about the slave auction block in Fredericksburg, we share this, with thanks to Kevin Levin over at Civil War Memory for pointing it out. It’s a creative, powerful representation of the sort of an event that was once commonplace on the streets of Fredericksburg.

From John Hennessy (much of what follows is derived from in a short piece I did in the Journal of Fredericksburg History, published by HFFI):

The place is popularly and benignly known as the post-war home of Sue Chancellor, who, as a 14-year old, found herself and her family caught in the maelstrom of the Battle of Chancellorsville. After the war, she and her husband Vespasian Chancellor (her cousin—hence she experienced no change in her name with marriage) moved into 300 Caroline and lived there till her death in 1936. For decades the home was widely known as the “Sue Chancellor House.”

Slaves waiting for sale.

But the house has an uncommon pedigree beyond Sue Chancellor’s residency there. It has a brief, vivid connection to the slave trade.

In the 1830s, Mrs. Mary Berkeley Minor Blackford lived down the street with her husband William Matthews Blackford, at what is now 214 Caroline (Fredericksburg’s homes did not get fixed street addresses until the late 19th century). Though the family would later contribute five sons to the Confederate cause, they were in fact social progressives, advocating education for slaves, colonization for freedmen and freewomen, and evincing discomfort with the institution, though they owned slaves themselves. For several years, Mrs. Blackford kept a journal, “Notes Illustrative of the Wrongs of Slavery.” (Read an earlier post about Mary Minor Blackford here.)

In that undated journal, Blackford wrote that “there is within a few yards of our house…a tolerably large brick house owned by Judge Green,” noting that “the front and side of the building are on the street”—confirming that the house was on a corner lot. Continue reading →

The ship-to-shore fighting at Aquia Landing in late May and early June 1861 noisily raised the curtain on a new genre of literature featuring that place and other locales in the Fredericksubrg area: accounts of life within and between two contending militaries.

These wartime diaries, letters, and reports, and the postwar reminiscences that followed, overshadowed a subtler but still intriguing genre focusing on prewar life, which itself had not lacked for contention and conflict.

At one place in particular, antebellum life acquired a scenic, contemplative backdrop as it flowed along one of the the busiest corridors in Virginia: the railroad that opened from Richmond to Fredericksburg in 1837, and in 1842 from Fredericksburg to Aquia Landing. When northbound passengers reached the railroad terminus at Aquia and transferred to steamboats for the next stage of their journey, to Washington and railroad connections to points beyond, they made a sudden transition from confining, monotonous views of scrubby woodlands bordering the tracks to broad vistas of the Potomac River. Since the eighteen-teens, Potomac steamboats had been carrying passengers to and from Alexandria, Washington, and various landings in the Fredericksburg area.

While my knowledge of the literature on antebellum Potomac life is not sufficient for me to nominate its ideal eyewitness writer, I am able to recommend, highly, at least one eyewitness illustrator. On a June day in 1853, a British artist and curator named George Wallis voyaged from Washington down the Potomac to Aquia Landing, where he would board a train that carried him through Fredericksburg to Richmond. Wallis was in the midst of what ultimately became a 5,000-mile tour, tasked by his government with evaluating American art and manufactures.

Thanks to the generosity of a descendant, part of Wallis’ portfolio today resides at the Library of Congress.

In the course his journey down the Potomac, on June 26, 1853, Wallis sketched a steamboat:

It is the dark underbelly of Fredericksburg’s history: the slave trade. We know it took place here, but who, exactly, were the people in Fredericksburg trafficking in human beings? Were they an unseen underclass–pariahs? Little work has been done on them, but we do know a fair amount about three of them: Charles Yates, one of Fredericksburg’s most powerful merchants of the 18th century, and one of its most respected citizens (for Yates’s letters related to the slave trade, click here). Walter H. Finnall took up the trade here in the 1830s; he probably bought and sold slaves more voraciously than anyone in Fredericksburg’s history. And George Aler, who followed Finnall in the business in the 1840s, and who was the town’s major player in the slave trade at the onset of the Civil War.

We are working on Finnall, and will lay out what we find soon (some vivid and intensely interesting material). For the moment, let’s take an introductory look at George Aler.

Prior to the Civil War, Aler lived in what is today 300 Caroline Street (after the war the home of Sue and Melzi Chancellor, and so often referred to as the Sue Chancellor House). Aler was a brick-maker and ran the most successful of the three brickyards in town. He was, by most accounts, a respected member of the community. He was elected to town council in 1858, built St. Mary’s Church on Princess Anne Street, served on the board of the Fredericksburg Water Power Company, was appointed the town’s superintendent of streets, helped build the fairgrounds west of town, was a member of the Temperance Society, and even, in 1854, wrote a letter complaining about the lax enforcement of laws relating to the observance of the sabbath.

George Aler's house at 300 Caroline Street, later better known as the postwar home of the beloved Sue Chancellor--and thus most commonly referred to as "the Chancellor house."

But, from about 1848 until the Civil War, he was Fredericksburg’s dominant slave trader.

The references to him are many and ultimately require careful consideration (a task more suited to an article than a blog post), but we’ll share in raw form some of what we know.

Slave Isaac Williams remembered being purchased by Aler in the 1850s (Williams later escaped and told his story, which was then published).

I was sold to George A. Ayler of Fredericksburg, Virginia, a town situated on the Eappahannock river. Thither I was removed and kept by him in a sort of pen, where slaves and cattle were huddled promiscuously together. I was locked up at night in a little room just large enough to stand up in and kept there for nine days; then I was sold to Dr. James, a Tennessee slave dealer, who gave fifteen hundred dollars for me. (From Sunshine and Shadow of Slave Life: Reminiscences as Told by Isaac D. Williams to “Tege” [East Saginaw, 1885], pp. 9-11)

A young girl Julia Frazier was hired or sold to Aler in the 1850s. Many years later she remembered, “Father put me to workin’ for a nigguh trader…His name was George Aler. Man cursed with every breath he took. Had a saint for a wife. He couldn’ help it; jes’ natural with him.”

Aler’s partner in his brick-making business was John W. Coleman. He too was a slave trader–indeed had been Walter Finnall’s agent in town in the 1830s. Coleman, about whom I know little at this point, is the common link between the two men who dominated the town’s slave trade for nearly 40 years. (Thanks to David Ellrod of the NPS, who has uncovered a bit about Coleman.)

Aler also had a central role in the saga of Ellen Mitchell, a slave of J. Horace Lacy (of Chatham and Ellwood fame) who raised funds to buy her family’s way out of slavery. Ellen Mitchell is worth a post to herself, but Aler’s role in facilitating her fundraising is worth noting. It’s embodied in an article that appeared in the New York Times (and elsewhere) in 1859, which you can find here.

I’ll be working on this more in the coming weeks; it’s a fascinating topic, embodied still by places that survive within our midst.

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